Look for 'weird' extraterrestrial life on Titan, say scientists

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Don’t just focus on Earth-style life forms when looking for extraterrestrial beings, says the U.S. National Research Council, in a statement of the breathtakingly (be it oxygen or methane) obvious. “Advances throughout the last decade in biology and biochemistry show that the basic requirements for life might not be as concrete as we thought,” said committee chair John Baross, a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, Seattle. “The search so far has focused on Earth-like life because that’s all we know, but life that may have originated elsewhere could be unrecognizable compared with life here.” Goodness! One might think scientists were creatures of closed and narrow focus, in need of reminder that not everything that looks like a fork should go in your mouth! Developing (over the next thousand years). [GT]